Exporting contact info for Mail Merge

Remember letters? Those things you put in a mailbox and they arrived somewhere else a few days later? Here’s how you can export your contact lists in QuickBooks to use with the Mail Merge feature in other programs like iWork’s Pages or Microsoft Word so you can send mail to your customers.

Video script:

Hi, I’m Shelly with the QuickBooks for Mac team, and I’m going to answer a question someone emailed to us here at Little Square Central.

“I’m moving my business, and I want to send a postcard to all my customers to let them know my new address. Can I do that with QuickBooks?”

Well, yes and no. What you can do is export your customers’ names and addresses and then import that into a word processing program, like Word or Pages. And there you can create labels or a letter for your customer mailing.

So here’s what you do in QuickBooks. Choose File > Export > Addresses to Text File. You can select All Names which will export all the contact information you in QuickBooks, and that would everyone in your Customer, Vendor, Employee, or Other Names list. You also just select one of these lists to export. Or you can choose Selected Names and then select specific names to include in your export file. For this example, I’m just going to export my customer names. I click OK and enter a filename for my export file. And see QuickBooks let’s me know that the file has been successfully created.

This is as far as QuickBooks goes. So what do you do from here? Well, if you’re an iWork user, you can open that .txt file in Numbers. Then you can use that Numbers file in Pages’ Mail Merge feature to add those addresses to a letter. Apple has a really great tutorial that can explain this much better than I can. So I’m just going to include the URL on how to get that here: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/iwork/#pages-mailmerge

As for Microsoft Word, you can also use that program’s Mail Merge feature to create labels or use these addresses however you want to. All of this is explained in a Word help article.

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Shelly King works for Intuit as a member of the QuickBooks for Mac team. She’s the Managing Editor for Little Square and its main contributor. Shelly grew up in the South until 1994 when the Internet called her to Silicon Valley. She’s done a lot on the web ever since. Little Square was her idea. Yep, it’s all her fault. See all of Shelly’s articles